This blog post has been written in pieces for the past few days throughout my notes app, sticky notes, and the notepad I keep in my purse. I haven’t known where to really start when I think about describing this year. I thought maybe I could narrow it down to one word, or maybe pick a song that would define it. But the words get caught in the back of my throat, if they even exist at all. Typically I get this blog post out before the end of the year, I’ll hunker down on December 31st if I have to just to get it out before the time changes to a new year and I have to leave all of it in the past. 

But here I am at 10:12 pm on January 1st, 2026, and I’m sure it will take me a few more days to put these feelings into words. But time is not cut and dry, and I’ve had to learn that lesson over and over these past few years. I think it’s finally starting to become comforting, though. January 1st doesn’t always mean a timelapse to a new future. Sometimes it’s a slow-burn supercut of what led us here. 

Maybe I’ll start with where I’m at, and work backwards. 

I just finished watching the season finale and very last episode of Stranger Things. It’s not uncommon for media and entertainment to make my thoughts flow to my hands and write, but this ending hit me in a way I haven’t felt in a long time. Parts of it took me back to when I rewatched the series earlier this year. Other parts pulled me all the way back to summer ’22, when I first lived alone and had to listen to “Ribs” on repeat because Vecna scared the living hell out of me in my townhome. Then the ending described so many ways I’ve felt my own grief, and reminded me how far I’ve come from it. But some of the emotions I had this year feel farther away than the ones I had that summer three years ago, and vice versa. Again, time is never cut and dry. 

And time has moved really fucking fast this year. I feel stuck thinking about it ending because I can’t even process how it began. I am nowhere near where I thought I’d be. January iz was accepting a future of settling down in a small southern town because she believed in love. June iz then threw it all away because she believed in herself. And December iz is very tired, if I’m being completely honest. I feel like I woke up from a four year coma this year, and that’s a lot to catch up on. 

Did you know babies have poor vision when they’re first born because colors and details and the world are too much to process all at once? I’ve been thinking about that fact a lot because it feels so relatable. This year I was reborn, but my vision was crystal clear. Sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes I just want to close my eyes and hope it all dims before I open them again. 

Now it’s 2:11 am on January 3rd, and my eyes are still wide open, seeing everything in vivid color. Maybe this post will be published in fragmented thoughts coming to me as they so please, or maybe the iz who posts this will clean it into something coherent. Either way, writing this has become a pain in my ass. 

Because in full honesty, I don’t want to write it. 

I don’t want to think about everything that took place in 2025. A lot of it hurt. A lot of it I still can’t process enough to put into words. But most of it was necessary. I could very easily look back at 2025 with regret. The version of me who craves comfort hates me for walking away from the cookie-cutter path. The version of me that wants to be bigger hates me for moving back to my hometown. But who gives a fuck about them? That’s genuinely where I’m at. I understand where they’re coming from, but they haven’t lived what I’ve lived. And as exhausted and fatigued as I am, I really don’t mind where I’m at. I’m grateful I’m not on the easy path, and I’m content not being in bigger moments right now. Life just is. And 2025 ended with it just being what it was. 

So why write about it? Why rehash things I don’t currently feel and don’t want to feel anymore? 

Because that’s what past me has always done. I always rehash. I cling. I dig my nails and draw blood. I scream as I drown. 

But for the first time in my life, I’m ready to let go. 

I’m ready to live. 

And I want to keep going. 

I had been disassociated, swallowed by grief, and drowned in depression for long enough. 2025 made me realize it was time to swim to the surface and take a breath.  

When I finally started breathing, I learned a lot of lessons. The biggest one being that not everything is a lesson. Some things just are, and some things can just be. 

And all of those things that just are can shed from my body and I can let them just be. 

Now, it’s 1:00 pm on January 4th, and I think I’m going to leave this blog post disjointed because thats exactly how my thoughts are. One day I feel one way, the next day I feel the other way. Some days it all makes sense, and other days it all feels overwhelming. Every day I feel differently about how this year went. But after a night with some dear friends on a bottle of wine, laughing and listening to music and hating on the men we’re talking to, something clicked. I know how to explain it now. And of course I’m explaining it through music.

Back in February, there was a week that quietly set a repeated tone for the year. I was alone, physically and emotionally, and extremely sick. I was stuck in a lame ass town to watch the dog of my boyfriend at the time, living off of Mac and cheese, air fried mozzarella sticks, and the stash of champagne I knew my boyfriend had hidden in a storage closet. I was in a new kind of depression I hadn’t experienced before, and that basement couch I sat on for hours started to turn into my asylum. But at the same time, I was deep in creating the first issue of my magazine. Despite having no hope for the future being built for me, I clung to my creativity like it was my life support. Everyday I told myself I had to get up, shower, and then I could spend the rest of the day creating the magazine. During my showers, for whatever reason, I turned on Solar Power. I’ve always loved the album, but I’ve never connected to it. I knew that connection would come with age, as Lorde’s albums usually do. Being 23, in my first relationship, using my love and creativity as excuses to hide from the world, the lyrics began to make sense. But I didn’t feel the peace of it. I didn’t feel this calm, oceanic feeling she described. So of course, I texted Conner about it. After sending him the lyrics I was relating to and the ones  I wished I could feel, he responded, “I think I’ve come to realize that Solar Power is something we’ll always be chasing. It’s not something we’ll ever actually achieve.” 

And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

It seems disheartening at first, right? Who would want to believe that we will never reach a state of calm euphoria full of warmth and peace? 

I tried to hold onto these feelings of Solar Power for the next few months after February. But like Conner said, it isn’t something you achieve. 

Then Virgin came out. I was fresh off a breakup, still feeling the shift of turning 23, and processing the emotions of sleeping on my parents couch for a month inbetween living situations. When it came out, I went to Conner’s house, we put on our own individual headphones, pushed play at the same time, then walked around our neighborhood as we listened to the album we had tried to anticipate for years before. As I listened to the album, I felt it deep in my body. The lyrics weren’t being analyzed by my brain, they weren’t being processed in my heart, they were being understood right in my chest… in my ribs, if you will. I’ve never been in touch with my body, especially after years of dissociation. But when I first got sick that week in February, something shifted, and my body refused to be ignored. It had been holding all of the grief, tension, negative energy and thoughts, and Virgin spoke the things it was holding into words. It was a strange sensation listening to it, because I knew these songs were going to be something I would feel very soon. As if my body was receiving knowledge from a future timeline. 

But I’ve always been a few years behind Lorde’s emotions, so I wrote it off and went back to Solar Power. I spent the end of my summer going on walks, making girl dinners at home, sitting at my best friend’s grave, writing at my desk with my windows completely open, and going to sleep early to wake up with the sun. I would embody Solar Power and prove Conner wrong. It could be achieved. 

But by October I was actively living Virgin. Every feeling was visceral and deep inside of my ribs, my hips, my womb. Solar Power was nowhere to be found. And even with Virgin, it was only the painful tracks. The songs with any sort of processing or hope were not in my rotation. 

Then last night, listening to Virgin in it’s whole and our favorites from Solar Power, it was like the deep rooted pain and the spiritual delusion wrapped their arms around each other. The two pieces of my year had connected. 

It’s not that we’ll never achieve Solar Power — sometimes we will. We’ll have our days or our months where we consume ourselves with this idea of healing to reassure our pain and insecurities, and sometimes the convincing will work. But life is still there, and sometimes life is full of gore that causes us to crash out or fall to confusion or disassociate. 

Solar Power cannot stick. It will come and go and flow without us having any way to grasp or change it. And that’s comforting to me. It means that when the times come where I fall off, when life becomes too much or I’m too exhausted to pretend I’m okay, I wasn’t meant to stay up there forever. 

And if Virgin is what comes after the high of Solar Power, then let’s remember it starts with “Hammer”, and the song ends with, “It’s a fucked up world, been to hell and back, but I’ve sent you a postcard from the edge.” 

That postcard signifies survival. 

That’s exactly what this year has shown me: I survived. 

I made it through the shit, then I made it through some more shit, and I’ve collected all of these postcards from everything I experienced. 

And that’s what I’ll be carrying with me into this new year.

(Are you guys sick of me quoting Lorde lyrics to you and acting like I interpreted this huge secret to life yet?) 

Because of the person I became in 2025, I can feel a promise from 2026 that it’s all exactly how it should be. Sometimes a cycle will loop back around because time is never linear, and sometimes shit just happens because that’s life and not everything has to be a lesson all the time. 

So I’ll keep collecting postcards. I’ll keep surviving. I’ll have my moments of healing and moments of regression. And all of it will keep carving my story into my ribcage for the version of me who will one day understand it fully. 

To 2025: I offer you my gratitude for the knowledge you bestowed and the person you created, but I release you to my past to stay there for good. 

To 2026 iz: I know you’ll survive, because we always do. Sometimes a day is just a day. A bad feeling is only that. Send me a postcard when it all becomes too hard, and remember how easy it is to believe in the good.